Sailor Jentle Yama-Dori Review

Jun 13, 2015 by Felix Jen

Sailor, the Japanese fountain pen manufacturer, has a line of inks called Sailor Jentle. It is also known in the U.S. as the Four Seasons line. Recently, Sailor discontinued many of previous inks (such as Sky High), in favor of their new pigmented, Storia, inks, which I have yet to try. One of the inks that Sailor kept in production is Yama-Dori, or Copper Pheasant. Yama-Dori is a teal color which leans a bit towards blue, and has a huge amount of red sheen.

Personally, I don’t use teal colors very often as I find them a bit bland. However, this ink is a completely different story! The sheen on this one makes me want to grab for it every time I fill a pen!

All these photos of the writing used were taken with an iPhone 6 and have been color corrected to the best of my ability. They mostly represent the true color of the ink, regardless of the lighting conditions. Find me on FPN as musicman123!

The ink is a dark teal color as it comes out from a wet nib.

The review was done with a Noodler’s Konrad Acrylic (Lake Baikal) with a 0.8mm untipped sharp italic that I ground myself. Check out our Nib Services page on the top for more information about custom stub grinds!

The paper used is standard HP 32lb Premium Laser Paper, found readily at Staples and Amazon. The paper takes ink just as well, if not better, than Rhodia and Clairefontaine. It is my go-to paper for all tasks.

Here is a swab of the ink to get a look at the color of the ink in very wet conditions. Ignore the fingerprints!

This ink is definitely well-behaved like most other Sailor inks. The ink is very wet and is quite lubricated. There is no bleed through and virtually no show through on my paper. On Tomoe River, there is also very little show through, even with a super wet nib. With a different nib, there is also a pretty big amount of shading. But, if the nib is too wet, the shading gets lost.

The ink dries at a reasonable speed considering how glossy and smooth the HP 32lb paper is. It takes about 15 seconds to dry.

Here is a water test. The top grid had drops of water placed for 10 seconds, then vigorously wiped downwards. The bottom text did not receive any drops of water and was only wiped with in the same motion as the grid. The ink did not perform very well on this test. There was a lot of lifting on the grid followed by a huge amount of wet smear. The text is barely readable due to the wet smear. Do not use this ink on important documents.

This ink has a CRAZY amount of red sheen! Here is a picture of it coming from an even WETTER 1.3mm stub!